Bell Hooks Quotes

#1. She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political
for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)

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#2. Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
- Bell Hooks

Win Quier

#3. I am passionate about everything in my life
first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.
bell hooks

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#4. When I started blogging in 2004, I responded to every comment no matter how nasty the reader was. I was generally polite, believing that these critics would be so charmed by my professionalism that they would see the error of their misogynist ways and swiftly run out to read a bell hooks book. Ha!

Jessica Valenti

#5. I'm terrified of saying the wrong thing on stage with bell hooks.

Laverne Cox

#6. The biggest thinker that's influenced my feminism is definitely Bell Hooks, who's a feminist cultural critic, because of her accessibility but also just because she's a genius.

Jessica Valenti

#7. Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.

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#8. Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.

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#9. I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.

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#10. A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.

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#11. Loving friendships provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected.

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#12. I think life experiences are different for people who know what they want as children.

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#13. Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

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#14. Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

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#15. Ultimately the men who choose against violence, against death, do so because they want to live fully and well, because they want to know love. These are the men who are true heroes, the men whose lives we need to know about, honor, and remember.

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#16. Without justice there can be no love.

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#17. There is no politically neutral art.

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#18. Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.

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#19. The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things, led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one's viewpoint.

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#20. Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn't want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.

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#21. I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me? As

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#22. I think stress is anything going on in our lives that impinges on our capacity to have optimum well being.

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#23. The idealized woman becomes property, symbol, and ornament; she is stripped of her essential human qualities. The devalued woman becomes a different kind of object; she is the spittoon in which men release their negative anti-woman feelings.

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#24. [Our] struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.

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#25. All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.

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#26. Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.

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#27. Nowadays we go to a movie and must watch commercials first. The relaxed, receptive state of surrender we like to reserve for the [...] film [...] is now given over to advertising where our senses and our sensibilities are assaulted against our will

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#28. I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice. The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.

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#29. We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they're beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.

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#30. It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.

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#31. Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. When we see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love.

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#32. The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks ... of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources.

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#33. One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.

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#34. Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.

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#35. The neat binary categories of white and black or male and female are not there when it comes to class. How will they identify the enemy. How will they know who to fear or who the challenge.

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#36. As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.

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#37. The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth.

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#38. Spirits bring contentment for a time carry us closer to the sacred moving through bitterness our yearning to hold on to moments of ecstasy where we imagine we hear clearly destiny calling

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#39. Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

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#40. Ironically, the worship of of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death's power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives.

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#41. Spiritual seekers let their light shine so that others may see; not only to give service by example, but also to constantly remind themselves that spirituality is most gloriously embodied in our actions, our habits of being.

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#42. Couples who rarely or never have sex can know lifelong love.

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#43. It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response.

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#44. ... move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.

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#45. It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

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#46. Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.

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#47. Without confronting internalized sexism women
who picked up the feminist banner often betrayed the cause in their
interactions with other women.

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#48. Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.

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#49. While the patriarchal boys in hip-hop crew may talk about keeping it real, there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip-hop.

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#50. To critique sexist images without offering alternatives is an incomplete intervention. Critique in and of itself does not lead to change.

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#51. If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.

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#52. Shahrazad Ali's The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman.

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#53. To not understand neocolonialism is to not fully live in the present.

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#54. Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture.

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#55. If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.

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#56. I have no fear here, in this world of trees, weeds, and growing things.

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#57. Most gay men are as sexist in their thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behaviour that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men.

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#58. Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.

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#59. Ritically intervene in a way that challenges and changes.

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#60. Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.

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#61. All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.

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#62. The principle of equality, which is at the core of democratic values, has very little meaning in a world in which global oligarchy is taking over.

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#63. As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.

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#64. We need to interrogate "reverence," for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.

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#65. Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.

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#66. We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

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#67. Showing aggression is the simplest way to assert patriarchal manhood. Men of all classes know this. As a consequence, all men living in a culture of violence must demonstrate at some point in their lives that they are capable of being violent.

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#68. Threads of power and domination a palimpsest of greed

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#69. Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it.

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#70. I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.

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#71. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.

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#72. My belief that God is love, that love is everything
our true destiny
sustains me.

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#73. Love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life enhancing.

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#74. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.

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#75. A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.

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#76. The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.

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#77. When men and women are loyal to ourselves and others, when we love justice, we understand fully the myriad ways in which lying diminishes and erodes the possibility of meaningful, caring connection, that it stands in the way of love.

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#78. Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.

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#79. I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.

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#80. The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.

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#81. I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

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#82. Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

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#83. If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades it's meaning.

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#84. I gather together the dreams, fantasies, experiences that preoccupied me as a girl, that stay with me and appear and reappear in different shapes and forms in all my work. Without telling everything that happened, they document all that remains most vivid.

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#85. Failure to examine the victimization of men keeps us from understanding maleness, from uncovering the space of connection that might lead more men to seek feminist transformation.

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#86. We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything.

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#87. The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily.

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#88. Wisely, Baldwin insisted that we are always more than our pain. Not only did he believe in our capacity to love, he felt black people were uniquely situated to risk loving because we had suffered.

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#89. He fate of the poor both locally and globally will to a grave extent determine the quality of life for those who are lucky enough to have class privilege. Repudiating exploitation by word and deed is a gesture of solidarity with the poor.

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#90. The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.

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#91. In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.

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#92. Naming oppressive realities, in and of itself, has not brought about the kinds of changes for oppressed groups that it can for more privileged groups, who command a different quality of attention.

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#93. I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.

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#94. I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self.

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#95. [O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.

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#96. Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

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#97. Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world.

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#98. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy.

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#99. All the men I fall for seem to have a commitment problem.

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#100. As long as females take up the banner of feminist politics
without addressing and transforming their own sexism, ultimately
the movement will be undermined.

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